Texting Toward Utopia? Maybe not.

Back in the 70s, the USSR’s strength seemed impenetrable. Every now and then someone would manage to defect to the West, and the news media would report how bad Communism was, how limited freedom was, how grateful these individuals were to be in the West, how sad they were to leave their country.

The news coverage made me think that everyone wanted to leave, they all wanted to live in the West where freedom and democracy reigned and there was liberty and justice for all. It made me think that if given the opportunity, if the USSR weren’t so repressive, the people would all rise up and revolt and choose our form of government.

In retrospect, I realize that my perspective was limited. Not everyone wanted to leave and not everyone wanted to change the government. And while I truly do believe that we live in an amazing country, I have since learned that we have our own problems with freedom and democracy and human rights.

In “Texting Toward Utopia,” Evgeny Morozov suggests that we have a similarly narrow perspective, and we have been a little optimistic when it comes to the “Internet’s democratizing potential” (1/9).

Evgeny Morozov is a leading thinker and commentator on the political implications of the Internet. He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's blog about the Internet's impact on global politics Morozov is currently a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's E.A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

This article is filled with lots of overstatement and understatement. This sort of tone is particularly helpful as his chief strategy is to introduce claims of “democratizing potential,” to concede portions of those claims, and then to refute the absolute nature of those claims by introduce alternate possibilities.

He begins by providing quotes made by U.S. presidents and their speechwriters pertaining to the Internet’s freedom-producing power:

· Reagan: “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip”

· Clinton – described Internet censorship as “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”

· George W. Bush – “imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread”

He He notes that others have been optimistic as well:

· Rupert Murdoch, the 132-nd richest person in the world and the owner of several newspapers and Fox Network:

o “Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.”

· The author notes sites like Facebook, YouTube and Blogger, which are especially unpopular with authoritarian regimes and declare that the Internet will lead to nothing short of a revolution—in politics and information.

· They declare that the Internet will bring about freedom on earth!

Morozov isn’t quite as optimistic. He notes that internet censorship has increased since 2003. He cites Carnegie Report that warned the “global infusion of the Internet presents both opportunity and challenge for authoritarian regimes” and concluded that “the political impact of the Internet would vary with a country’s social and economic circumstances, its political culture, and the peculiarities of the . . . Internet infrastructure” (1).

He concedes that some things have been hopeful—

· Ukraine activists relied on new-media technologies to mobilize supporters during the Orange Revolution

· Colombian protesters used FB to organize massive rallies against leftist guerrillas

· Photos of anti-government protests in Burma quickly traveled the globe, affecting international response

· Democratic activists in Zimbabwe used the Web to track vote rigging I last year’s election and phones to take photos of election results posted outside polls, providing proof of irregularities

BUT – as he clearly puts it,

“Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life.”

Obviously, a dictator in Second Life’s synthetic realm holds no threat to the world we live in, and so Morozov sets up an easily toppled straw man to make his point that the idea of Internet revolution isn’t that simple.

Many factors need to be considered when assessing the role of the Internet in fulfilling the “grandiose promise of technological determinism” (2).

He introduces examples that show new media benefit that might signal revolution and then demonstrates that there are other factors.

· It has been proposed that Barack Obama’s electoral success is due to his team’s mastery of databases, online fundraising, and social networking.

o Offers that yes, this is true, but to claim the “primacy of technology over politics would be to disregard”

§ Obama’s charisma

§ The legacy of the unpopular Bush administration

§ Global financial crisis

§ Choice of Sarah Palin

o In other words, “one cannot grant much legitimacy to the argument” that web savvy gave Obama the election.

· Orange Revolution in the Ukraine

o Mobile phones

§ 150 mobile groups responsible for spreading information and coordinating election monitoring

§ 72 regional centers

§ 30,000 registered participants

o He points out that to “focus so singularly on the technology is to gloss over” the other factors

§ the brutal attempts to falsify the results of the presidential elections that triggered the protests,

§ the two weeks that protesters spent standing in the freezing November air,

§ the millions of dollars pumped into the Ukrainian democratic forces to make those protests happen in the first place” (3).

In other words, online tools play a significant role—in addition to the role of DIRECT COMMUNICATION.

He concedes that “even third world countries have this kind of access to global communication, the Internet is making “group and individual action cheaper, faster, and leaner.” It’s true. I was in Cameroun a few years ago. Access to indoor plumbing was limited, but nearly everyone had a portable, a mobile phone.

This concession allows Morozov to argue five things:

1. That logistics are not the only determinant of civic engagement and in fact,

a. He asks important questions:

i. What is the impact of the Internet on our incentives to act?

ii. Does the Internet foster an eagerness to act on newly acquired information?

b. He claims that whether the Internet augments or dampens this eagerness is both critical and undetermined.

2. Increased volume of information can actually work against the cause of informing individuals and groups.

a. Optimists claim that open data helps to expose abuses of power (3)

i. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.

b. As we all know, doing searches on the internet means asking your search engine the right questions.

i. He illustrates the problems by providing the example of Bernie Madoff, even publicly available filings with the SEC don’t mean that someone is going to get caught.

ii. Just because the information is there doesn’t mean that the average user knows where to look or what questions to ask.

iii. As Mozorov puts it, “making sense of 1.2 million documents uploaded to Wikileaks will take time, effort, and a large contingent of investigative journalists” (4)

iv. Not all crimes are documented in ways that can be categorized and put online.

3. New media technologies don’t always mean that we can be persuaded to change.

a. Sometimes we just search out more information like the information we already have.

i. “enclave extremism”

ii. One of the responses to this article came from someone living in Bangladesh who claimed that the “notion that free flow of information will reduce intolerance has proved futile. On the other hand, it seems to make both groups more extreme.”

4. Blogs and other new media technologies can be used against the cause of freedom and democracy as defined by the West.

a. Much of the value that readers place in blogs hinges on the perception that the authors are independent, free from manipulation by the state or other third-parties.

b. Old media: Soviets didn’t ban radio; they jammed certain Western stations and exploited the medium to promote their ideology.

c. China and Russia are the two states most active in posting Web content.

5. There is no guarantee freedom and democracy, as defined by the West, is what other cultures desire.

a. Little evidence that an open internet will suddenly make the Chinese or Russians dream of democracy.

b. Illustration of this idea: East Germans who could not tune in to West German broadcasting had higher rates of opposition to their government than those who did.

c. Reports that most Egyptian bloggers are pro-West didn’t take into account that the secular, progressive, and pro-Western bloggers tend to write in English rather than in their native language.

d. Labeling a Muslim Brotherhood blog as “undemocratic” suggests duplicity.

i. If that is what the majority of people in a country chose, then this really is government by the people—and enforcing our version of democracy would actually be undemocratic.

Morozov concludes with a warning: The problem with building public spheres from above, online, or offline, is much like that of building Frankenstein’s monsters: we may not like the end product.

In other words, be careful about assuming that use of the Internet can only lead to democratization. It would be wise to figure out specifically how the Internet can benefit existing democratic forces and organizations, very few of which have shown much creativity in using technology.